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A Wolf In Sheep's Clothing

5:42 PM GMT 23/08/2010

A Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing. Why Ram is McCartney’s earliest solo classic, and how it helped invent modern bedroom rock, by Danny Eccleston.

The reinvention of Paul McCartney - the most instinctively baroque of the Beatle composer/arrangers - into an avatar of lo-fi, DIY music production seems instant and baffling. Consider the decision of the rest of the Beatles - hotly contested by McCartney at the time and resented for years afterwards - to hand over the tapes of Let It Be to Phil Spector and it begins to make more sense.

The controversial Wall Of Sound producer had his familiarly maximalist way with the grab-bag of skeletal cast-offs, and McCartney would wait until 2003, and the release of the reverse-engineered Let It Be... Naked, for his humbler "vision" for the record to see the light of day. At the back end of 1969, moving into early 1970, it was as if the mortal offence was driving McCartney as far away from the accepted gold-standard of contemporary record production (as the Beatles themselves had helped define) as possible.

As, following the relatively harmonious recording of Abbey Road, Beatle relations resumed their bitter decline, McCartney's response was to hunker down in his Cavendish Avenue flat and make music with whatever fell to hand. There are evocative pictures - printed in the latest MOJO magazine - of the unkempt, hermit-like Beatle recording a drum draped in a curtain or tablecloth, as if determined not to disturb the neighbours, and it's these kinds of unrefined, non-bombastic, locally-sourced sounds that grace his eccentric 1970 debut, McCartney.

However, McCartney is not lo-fi in the way we tend to use the term today. Rather than merely earthy or unpolished, it is demonstrably unfinished. Irrespective of the beauty of Junk and the regularly revived Every Night, if you were tipped the wink that McCartney was deliberately rushed out by its author as a spoiler for Let It Be (eventually, McCartney beat the final Beatle album out by two weeks) you would not be shocked. Maybe I'm Amazed aside, which, apart from its rudimentary rhythm guitar guides and muffled drums, is almost as perfect as could be imagined, it is a record of fragments, demos and doodles, good as far as they suggest to the imaginative listener the great places they may have gone next.

Ram is different. Side one, especially, has much of the intimacy of McCartney, the impression of one man gluing something together before your very eyes. Sometimes - it's there in opener Too Many People's haunting, weird distance and tangled jangling outro - it makes you think of Beck, or more recent American bedroom psych.

There's an interest, taken further than the Beatles, in non-naturalistic textures and environments, typified by the close-mic'ed vocals of 3 Legs, or extreme-left-channel percussive oddness of Dear Boy. Underlining the continuing relevance of many of these techniques, Ram On's primitively reverbed ukulele and ghostly chorus of disembodied Maccas could easily have been recorded sometime last year. Probably in Portland, Oregon.

Ultimately, Ram is the sound of a man who's left a band, perhaps the whole idea of a band, behind. Thrown onto his own resources, he is not so much capturing a performance than showing the stages in the construction of a piece. The first po-mo rock record? Perhaps.

Even when the results are slicker or more instrumentally ambitious - as in the exquisite soft-rock fantasia of the string'n'horns-laden Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey - the spirit of play is paramount. To the extent, perhaps, that Macca sometimes fails to take himself seriously enough, and that "I can smell your feet a mile away" line in Smile Away is surely too brutal a deconstruction of Beatle music's already myth-shrouded exaltation. There's nothing wrong with giving yourself time to realise that "yesterday" is a better lyric than "scrambled eggs..."

Admittedly, by the end of Ram, McCartney is already emerging from his cave. Monkberry Moon Delight is Macca waxing more muscular, with a gruff geezer vocal that predicts Tom Waits at his most ursine. Suddenly we can hear the move from Mull Of Kintyre (where these songs were written and demoed) to New York's A&R Studios, the scene of much of the recording. At the very end we have The Back Seat Of My Car - perhaps our most prescient glimpse of the super-polished Wings-to-be of Band On The Run.

For a bossy, pan-instrumental auteur like McCartney, whose instinct is to do everything himself or tell others exactly what to play (a trait that so charmed George Harrison, and Henry McCullough, among others) the one-man-band model will always have attractions, and it is one to which he has returned, on and off, ever since.

McCartney always saw the freedom inherent in the tape recorder, even when making spliffed-up sound collages upstairs at the Ashers' house on Wimpole Street in late 1965, and he has bequeathed this vision to rock and pop for all time. Ram helps remind us that we owe him more than we sometimes care to think.

By Danny Eccleston

Posted by Ross_Bennett at 5:42 PM GMT 23/08/2010

Related MOJO content:

Beatles , Paul McCartney

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  • great piece!

    Posted by Monkberry Moon Delilah at 12:17 PM GMT 24/08/2010 Report Abuse

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  • Ram is an amazing record. Period. Music bloggers in the U.S. have been quietly singing its praises for a couple of years now for exactly the reasons you mention. It's a strange and beautiful album that deserves far more praise than its ever received.

    I like McCartney's first solo album a lot, too. Besides the songs you mention, "That Would Be Something" is lovely. Apparently Jack White thinks so, too, since he sang a snippet of that song at the Gershwin ceremony for McCartney recently. And The Roots on their latest record sampled a cut ("Momma Miss America") from this same album.

    McCartney is maddening is so many ways. And his solo work is such a mixed bag, but when it's good, it's really really good.

    Posted by Mike at 1:20 PM GMT 24/08/2010 Report Abuse

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  • Brilliant article, well written by Danny - as always.

    Posted by Only A Northern Song at 1:27 PM GMT 24/08/2010 Report Abuse

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  • The negative evaluation of Ram in the Carr & Tylers "The Beatle's Illustrated Record" has dogged this album for far too many years. Not that everyone listened to their opinion.

    Elvis Costello's airing of "Every Night" on a radio show led to McCartney's inclusion of it in his set for the Concert For Kampuchea a few days later, where it was recorded and made available on the resulting Rock for Kampuchea lp. That act may have facilitated the eventual collaboration between Macca and McManus.

    Screaming Jay Hawkins covered "Monkberry Moon Delight", which has been heard in the pre-concert music to many of Paul's shows. .

    The song snippet heard on the coda of "Ram On (Reprise)" later resurfaced as "Big Barn Bed" on Red Rose Speedway.

    If there's any fault with the album it's Paul's venting his anger at his former band mates in many of the songs, though one can also argue that it adds an edge similar to that of the troubles behind the making of the Band On The Run album. The cover picture of the two beetles copulating was just the start. John and Yoko took offense at some of the lyrics which they (rightly) interpreted as criticizing them. "That was your first mistake. / You took your lucky break / and broke it in two. / Now what can be done for you?/ You broke it in two." and even "We believe that we can't be wrong" from "Back Seat of My Car". "Three Legs" "Dear Boy" "Smile Away" and "Monkberry Moon Delight" also have lyrics expressing contempt and derision.

    Lennon returned the favour on Imagine, whose original issue included a post card of John grasping a pig in mockery of the cover photo of Paul grasping a ram. "How Do You Sleep" was his most vitriolic response with the album version being lyrically toned down from one of the filmed outtakes. Yet a bootleg from the sessions for Lennon's Roots/Rock 'n' Roll album includes Lennon attempting to play the "Hands across the water" bit of "Uncle Albert/ Admiral Halsey".

    An instrumental version of the Ram album by Percy "Thrills" Thrillington was made and that's all that needs to be said about it.

    But the one track that should have been covered when Brian Wilson and Paul teamed up for a concert in 2007 is "Back Seat of My Car." The song is an homage to post Pet Sounds Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys in the first place and maybe it was too close for Brian to handle even 40 years later.

    There's the documented story of Paul dropping in during the "Smile" sessions to play "She's Leaving Home" for Brian shortly before the project was shelved.(Brian Wilson feature interview in Paul McCartney: Now and Then). I've always wondered if Brian got so spooked by the song being so close to his own work of the time (think "Surf's Up", "Wonderful") that he became paranoid. Take away the Mike Leander [Gary Glitter's producer!] string arrangement and you have a song that has Brian Wilson written all over it - except for the lyrics. Brian even did a live version of it, as can be found on YouTube and some other sites.

    In the aftermath of their collaboration, Brian regards Paul as both friend and competitor, sometimes favouring one over the other according to his mood.

    Posted by Frederick Harrison at 7:38 PM GMT 27/08/2010 Report Abuse

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  • Paul's .Cavendish Avenue flat'???? Come on.... everyone knows it's a bloody big detached house so I doubt he had to drape the drums with a curtain for fear of disturbing the neighbours.

    Posted by Roy at 7:30 PM GMT 28/08/2010 Report Abuse

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  • Nicely written pondering of Paul's sometimes overly casual approach to solo writing and recording. Love the idea that while Spector was trying to put a commercial sheen on "Let It Be," Macca was quickly blasting out an entire album of rough cuts -- "getting back" all by himself!

    One note: that photo actually shows Paul replicating Ringo's "pudding" drum recording technique of muffling the drumheads with towels.

    Posted by beatlefreak at 9:19 PM GMT 03/09/2010 Report Abuse

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  • Nicely written pondering of Paul's sometimes overly casual approach to solo writing and recording. Love the idea that while Spector was trying to put a commercial sheen on "Let It Be," Macca was quickly blasting out an entire album of rough cuts -- "getting back" all by himself!

    One note: that photo actually shows Paul replicating Ringo's "pudding" drum recording technique of muffling the drumheads with towels.

    Posted by beatlefreak at 9:20 PM GMT 03/09/2010 Report Abuse

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  • You got it wrong, Beck makes me think of RAM not the other way around.

    I had the priviledge of seeing Paul perform RAM ON on his recent US tour; some nights he played it, some nights not, and it was not listed on any official set list. It was brilliant!

    Posted by Melody at 6:08 PM GMT 05/09/2010 Report Abuse

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  • Some of the greatest album of Macca is a versatile since mccartney first album, with songs critical of the John Lennon Too many people and who returned the gift with How Do You Sleep? Imagine album of 1971, through the most versatile and with the help of beloved Linda McCartney: Ram on, Uncle Albert and rhythmic blues folk: Monkberry Moon Delight, with compositions made during the sessions of the album Let It Be: The Back Seat Of My car, in the released version on CD has two bonus tracks wonders: Another Day and Oh! Woman Oh! Why released on single.

    Great album!

    Paul launches Thrillington is the 1977 album, a version of Ram oequestrada under the pseudonym of Percy "Thrills" Thrillington.

    Posted by Fabio Beatle at 8:57 PM GMT 05/09/2010 Report Abuse

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  • I think Smile Away is a great track. And a funny one. And, when you think about it, quirky lyrics aside, it's a song with a serious message. In the song, Paul encounters 3 people (John, George, Ringo?) who basically insult him each time (I can smell your ... feet, breath, etc). This is a song about turning the other cheek and learning to smile in the face of hostility and betrayal.

    For me, Ram is the best solo album by an ex-Beatle. It's the one I want to listen to regularly. It's the one I hear new things on regularly.

    Posted by Phil at 1:42 PM GMT 07/09/2010 Report Abuse

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  • If we celebrate Lennon for expressing his rage honestly in his music, why shouldn't we celebrate McCartney for doing the same thing in his own way? I heard someone call Ram a "beautifully angry" album and I think it is.

    Posted by diane at 12:14 AM GMT 10/09/2010 Report Abuse

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  • Well said, Diane. Lennon's fabled 'honesty' was, in fact, masturbatory and childish tantrumage and nobody confirms it more than he did in later interviews when he would go on to disown his own actions and words via the same conceits. The same lack of truth and accuracy was adopted to diss McCartney by the many Lennon acolytes in the critical media.

    While only McCartney can know how all of this mass-reproduced sheepish rubbish affected him, one thing is certain: he kept on working through it and the result has been a long period of re-evaluation of his work that is being led by younger music-fans to whom names like Charles Shaar Murray and Roy Carr will never mean diddly.

    Posted by Michael Kearney at 1:22 PM GMT 07/08/2011 Report Abuse

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